ParkMobile App Store Spotlight

ParkMobile is an app designed to help users find, save and pay for parking spots. It can help users ensure they’ll have a good spot to park, but is its App Store Optimization strong enough to ensure it a good spot in the App Store and Play Store search results? For this week’s App Store Spotlight, we take a look at ParkMobile and see if its ASO is driving it to the top.

iOS

On the Apple App Store, ParkMobile is ranked third in the
Navigation category. It’s the first app in searches for “find parking,” “mobile
parking,” “park app” and several similar parking terms. It’s also the second
highest app for competing parking apps, such as “ParkWhiz” and “Spot Hero.” Its
ranking only begins to get lower for navigation-specific terms, such as
“navigation apps” at #14, or certain parking terms for apps like “parking king”
(#22) or “parkme parking” (#14). Overall, it maintains high rankings for
several important parking keywords.

Creatives:
ParkMobile’s icon uses a brand icon – a white P within a circle on a green
background. This iconography provides the app with an identifiable design,
which is reflected in its screenshot designs. The same green color is used in
every other screenshot image, alternating with a matching blue shade.

The screenshots themselves are primarily focused on the maps
of parking lots. But it does alternate the imagery with screenshots showing how
it can reserve spots or alert users when their parking time is about to expire.
Each one is accompanied with large text calling out the features immediately.

ParkMobile uses six of the ten screenshots the App Store
allows. It could use the remaining four to show more features, such as the
“Find Your Car” feature or navigation, but the overall design of the screenshots
it uses are solid.

Title & Subtitle:
The app’s full name is “ParkMobile – Find Parking.” This uses 25 of the 30
characters the App Store allows, while providing information about the app’s
function and adding more keywords it can index for. While it does have space
for five more characters, there are limited options for what else it could fit.

The subtitle, “A Smarter Way to Park,” is a good tagline for
branding purposes but not for App Store Optimization. While it does help the
app index for “park” terms, including “park smarter” at #2, it ends up indexing
for irrelevant searches such as “the way” (#8) “ways” (#41) and “smarter agent”
(#10). Additionally, it only uses 21 characters. It could rework the subtitle
to be more keyword-focused while utilizing all 30 characters, which could
improve its indexation while still providing information about the app to users.

Description:
ParkMobile’s description starts off with a lengthy paragraph, which is
difficult to read in full on a mobile device. Users will tend to skip over
longer blocks of text, so they’ll miss the information within it.

The paragraph could be easily broken into smaller
paragraphs. There’s no need to include a list of cities it’s available for in
the first paragraph; that would be better served as a smaller line further down
into the description.

It does utilize bullet lists to describe parts of the app,
which is good for ease of reading. The description could take this a step
further and use multiple lists for the features, instead of just “Why Use
ParkMobile,” “How It Works” and “App Features.” For instance, it could use
different feature sets to describe how it helps find parking, manage parking,
find your car, the various payment methods, and so on.

Google Play

On Google Play, ParkMobile is the top-ranked app for terms
like “parking app,” “pay parking” and “city parking.” It’s also in the top five
for parking terms like “find parking” and “pay by phone parking,” as well as
city-specific parking like “SF parking” and “park Chicago.” While it does offer
a “find my car” feature, it only ranks as #27 for that term, and comes in at
#32 for “parking free.”

Creatives: The
icon remains the same on Google Play and iOS, maintaining a sense of brand and
identity across both devices. Similarly, the screenshots are nearly identical,
although the Google Play creative set shows an Android handset instead of an
iPhone.

The big difference between the store listings is the video
on Google Play. The video is a minute and 22 seconds long and features a
narrator telling users how the app works and what it has to offer. While the
visuals are effective at providing information, the video should provide an
overview and the benefits; instead it goes into too much detail about the
registration process and each step required to use the app. A video that’s
shorter and more to-the-point would be better at intriguing users and
encouraging them to download the app. While instructional videos are good for
helping confused users and mitigate negative reviews, they also need to follow
ASO best practices.

Description &
Metadata: The description for ParkMobile is identical across both stores.
While paragraphs can be slightly longer than 1-2 lines on Google Play,
ParkMobile could still break its introductory paragraph into smaller lines by
order of importance, rather than trying to present them all in the first paragraph.

As with iOS, the bullet lists are good for presenting
information quickly, although the feature list could be broken into more
specific sets. Each feature, bullet point and line should begin with a keyword,
which ParkMobile does for the most part. Several lines begin with terms like
“Parking Reservations” and “Parking Availability” to reinforce its “parking”
keyword.

There are still some lines where it could work in the
keywords more. For instance, when it says, “get alerts so you know when your
parking session is going to expire,” it could instead say “Parking alerts” or
“Parking meter alerts” to index for those terms. By utilizing targeted keywords
throughout the introduction and feature sets, ParkMobile could increase its
indexation for those terms.

Overall

ParkMobile has done a fine job at ranking high for several
valuable parking terms, but there is still room for improvement. This would
require tweaks to several aspects of the app to follow ASO best practices.

For its creative sets, it could include a few more
screenshots on both stores, while its Google Play video can be condensed for
easy viewing and to entice users without explaining the onboarding process to
them. Its description could be reformatted slightly on each store to be easier
for users to read at a glance and to integrate more keywords – this would be
helpful for its Google Play indexation and its Search Ads relevancy on the
Apple App Store.

With these few small changes, ParkMobile could potentially
index for more terms and improve its rankings for the terms it currently has.
There’s always room to improve, and App Store Optimization can help apps get
the top spots for any number of searches. Without it, an app could be stuck in
traffic for a long while before it can park on a user’s phone.